I SAW THE MOON
By Gaither Stewart
French President Nicolas Sarkozy, a Bushite figure, with his former model wife and renowned salopette, Carla Bruni. Always glad to play useful foil to America’s designs, but harboring ambitions of his own.
(Rome) Last Saturday night I saw the Supermoon. The same March 19 night that Operation “Odyssey Dawn” was launched against the Libya of Muammar Gadaffi, the earth’s star in all its glory passed its nearest point to planet Earth as it does every 19 years. This time it was a full moon. It hovered over my house. At midnight the yellow Supermoon illuminated my front yard almost as a winter sun does at midday. That same night the same moon shone also over Tripoli, 600 miles the south, illuminating all of Libya as it did my front yard.
Many (with ample reason) doubt claims of a spontaneous uprising of Libyan people, poorly armed and disorganized. Many suspect the usual hidden roles of foreign powers and that the Libyan crisis was created artificially, something like Iraq and Kosovo.
Under that moon, French Rafale jets attacked Libya. The impatient, arrogant and presumptuous French President Sarkozy showed off his new Rafale aircraft to the Arab world where France apparently hopes to sell loads of the new fighter plane. Tactically, Sarkozy simply jumped the gun in order to get there first. To put the French stamp on the operation and to claim a slice of the post-Gadaffi Libyan pie. The Rafales attacked before Italy had time to accomplish its role of knocking out Libyan radar guiding Gadaffi’s anti-aircraft. To astonished Libyan gunners, the Rafales must have looked like a sitting duck up there against that moon.
If you are in Europe today, you would not suspect that the US Africa Command under General Carter Ham might be in charge of Operation Odyssey Dawn. Except for the rain of 158 US missiles over Libya, in Europe the US is barely mentioned as a participant. Here, it is depicted as a European operation, with US backup. In fact on March 21, three days after the start of the air strikes, European media spoke of US withdrawal from the operation. But history shows that is pure fantasy. American withdrawal from a war seems highly unlikely. And to boot a war against that good old enemy Muammar Gadaffi is highly doubtful.
However America’s position may be, it was the military anomaly of the French jumping the gun that set the stage for the dissension already dividing the ranks of the European nations supposedly adhering to the UN Resolution to establish a no fly zone over Libya and to protect Libyan civilians. Three days into the operation against Gadaffi and the Coalition of Volunteer Nations is already split. No one seems to be in command. Italy and France are at each other’s throats. Italy threatens to withdraw its airbases and go it alone if overall command is not put in the hands of NATO, preferably operating in the Naples headquarters with Italian support. NATO has said it is willing to assume command. But France wants the leadership for itself.
Not only the Italo-French controversy over who is in command, but also the question of what to do with Gadaffi, when and if he is deposed, perplexes Europe: exile abroad, or exile somewhere in Libya, or trial in The Hague for crimes against humanity, or (unspoken but intimated: his assassination). Hard to forget is that only several months ago Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi received his friend Muammar in Rome with full honors and kissed the dictator’s hand in public. Accompanied by his female bodyguard, his Amazonian Guard, Gadaffi set up his tents in a Rome park, where his horses and camels grazed while he was feted left and right. Also, though less ostentatious, Sarkozy recently received Gadaffi as a chief of state in the Elysée Palace in Paris.
Major European concerns are Libyan oil, trade and other economic considerations after the eventual deposition of Muammar Gadaffi. Meanwhile, Gadaffi’s threats to flood Europe with one million immigrants worry especially Italy and France. And Gadaffi’s “long war” threat hangs heavy over Europe and the North African Renaissance. Those who at first spoke of a Blitzkrieg, a lightning war, over in a few hours or days, are today scratching their heads in consternation. The question is, how to attack Gadaffi’s tanks and troops hidden in villages and small towns, waiting, waiting, waiting. The long war indeed seems more likely.
The ugly reality that dictators no less ferocious and corrupt than Gadaffi reign over other Middle East countries is a distasteful subject largely shrugged off: ‘After all we can’t discipline the whole world.’ Or, as someone asked, who can imagine bombing Saudi Arabia? Especially Italy is cautious in Libya both because of its own atrocious colonial record of cruelty there last century and because Libya is a major trading partner. Also, Prime Minister Berlusconi now feels sorry for his friend Muammar, who however accuses Italy of betrayal.
As well, France has a shameful colonial record in North Africa as a whole. Ironically, French-speaking Tunisian immigrants are pouring into the reception center on the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa with a population of 5000 and only 165 miles east of Tunisia. Today there also 5000 immigrants, a majority of whom want to move on to France. Xenophobic voices in Italy and France call for a naval blockade around Tunisia and Libya to halt the flow: another act of war despite the UN definition of “humanitarian intervention” for the operation in Libya that every European knows is already war.
Europe is divided. Germany refused to participate in Odyssey Dawn from the start. Other nations followed the German lead. Turkey opposes the intervention, tout court. Russia likewise condemns it. Norway first sent its aircraft then withdrew them to wait and see who will be in command. Other participating nations demand NATO overall command. No country except France likes the so-called Coalition of Volunteer Nations because France wants to go it alone in order to reap the greatest benefits.
Italian leftwing media are perplexed. All agree Gadaffi should go. Most agree that Libya is a different story from Egypt and Tunisia. Many also doubt claims of a spontaneous uprising of Libyan people, poorly armed and disorganized. Many suspect the usual hidden roles of foreign powers and that the Libyan crisis was created artificially, something like Iraq and Kosovo. Yet, on the evening of March 21, at the end of the third day of the “conflict” (use of the word “war” is largely frowned on in Italy since Italian President Napolitano declared this was NOT a war but a humanitarian intervention, a view which many consider naïve) a major leftwing TV talk show introduced a big group of North Africans and Arab-speaking journalists to depict the Libyan insurrection as a truly popular uprising against a dictator. An Italian Arab-speaking female journalist with long experience in the Arab world and who resides in Egypt declared with great passion: “After decades and decades of cruel oppression, people everywhere inevitably reach the point where they rise up and say “No! No more. We will take no more. The dictator must go.”
Of all the uprisings in the Maghreb, the case of Libya is perhaps the most opaque. Is the country a locus of true spontaneous insurrection or simply the target of an opportunistic maneuver by the West? By Gaither Stewart | 24 February 2011 [print_link] (Rome) Does colonialism pay off for anyone? In the long run, definitely not. There is always a payback. The events today in the North Africa reflect this story. The situation today is the living and the dying proof of the payback. An atrocious, insufferable payback. The English in Egypt, the French in Algeria, the Italians in Libya. But especially the occupied Arab peoples of Egypt, Algeria and Libya, have all paid and continue to pay the price of colonialism. The history of Libya as an Italian colony started near 1910 and lasted until 1947 when Italy waged war on the wrong side and lost all its colonies. After initial failure, the then Kingdom of Italy and soon afterwards, Fascist Italy, took control of the Ottoman provinces of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. After uniting the two areas as one colonial province, Italy revived the classical name of “Libya” as the official name of the colony. BELOW: Map of of Mediterranean region showing Italy (orange) and Libya (green). In ancient Roman times, Libya supplied the Roman empire with a huge number of animals—lions, elephants, etc.— for its bloody gladiatorial games, a factor which contributed to their decimation throughout the region. Like the other European colonialist powers, Italy “occupied” Libya, erecting concentration camps dedicated to killing Libyans, lagers-gulags, setting an example for those in Germany and Russia, killing and destroying at will. More than 100,00 people ended in the primal concentration camps where many thousands died in squalid condition, chiefly through starvation or disease, perhaps one third of the Cyrenaican population. Great waves of Italian colonizers followed then the military occupation, making new lives and forming what Rome called Italy’s Fourth Shore, ultimately part of Italy itself. In 1938, Governor Italo Balbo brought 20,000 Italian farmers to colonize Libya, and 26 new villages were founded for them, mainly in Cyrenaica.[4] Italians in Libya came to number 108,000, over 12% of the population according to the 1939 census. Plans called for eventually 500,000 Italians in Libya. They were concentrated in the city of Tripoli (37% of population, and Bengazi, (32%). Looking beyond race and culture to bolster the imperial objective, Rome favored the integration with the Arab population of Italian emigrants to Libya, thus making Libya a full-fledged Italian colony. Still today some older Libyan Arabs speak Italian. And my deceased Italian mother-in-law used to sing Arabic songs to my wife, distorted, jumbled words which my wife sings today but does not understand: “Tirilliri canin sucrana tirilliri jammena …” BELOW RIGHT: Italo Balbo, the 1934-1940 Governor of Italian Libya, is considered by some Italian historians (like G. Gentile) as the Father of modern Libya. He promoted the colonization of Libya by Libyan Italians. BELOW LEFT: Col. Gheddafi during one of his visits to Italy. His often bizarre idiosyncrasies provide a great deal of derisive material to the local media. Colonel Gheddafi—probably inspired by the example of Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt— took power in a coup d’état in 1969 and has reigned with an iron hand since, making him one of the longest-serving dictators in the world. Though Gheddafi has become fabulously rich on Libya’s petroleum, the country remains underdeveloped and unemployment figures astronomical. In 1970 he expelled the Italian colonizers while he impoverished Libya, killing his own people and engaging in international terrorism: payback. Since then Gheddafi has demanded more and more payback, demanding indemnization for damages to Libyan lands by decades of colonialism. In 1998 Italy offered a formal apology to Libya. The two nations signed a treaty of friendship in which US$5 billion in goods and services, including the Libyan portion of the Cairo-Tunis highway, would be given to Libya to end any remaining animosity. A highway! A highway to end a half century of colonialist plunder and confirmed genocide is as laughable as it is tragic. Today, cornered by his own greed, he continues blackmailing Italy and Europe with the threat of unleashing the emigration of up to 1.5 million emigrants. Europe is terrified. Once Europe occupied North Africa. Today North Africa demands payback. Was it worth it? In recent days the flag of King Idris has replaced the green flag of Gheddafi in the Cyrenaica, in Tobruk and Bengazi. According to al-Jazeera the dictator has hired hundreds of possibly African mercenaries and is again killing thousands of his own people. He reportedly suffers from psychological illnesses: self-inflated ego, megalomania (which he displays several times a year in Rome), schizophrenia, existential anxiety, and sadism, the will to murder half the population if necessary in order to maintain power. But then again, is that a real disease or merely that people susceptible to sociopathic behavior are usually successful in climbing the ladder of power?
Gheddafi’s Libya is a different ball game from Tunisia and Egypt. Where do the Enough Gheddafi posters come from and why the webmaster of this “organization” is listed on Movements.org? What is the role of the U.S. State Department in Movements.org, which a Pravda article claims helped launch the movement in 2008. What are the National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL) and the National Conference for the Libyan Opposition (NCLO) doing behind the scenes? And where are these organizations based? They are based respectively in Washington and London and they coordinate teams of “information providers” operating inside Libya: are they saboteurs, terrorists and/or agents provocateurs? Meanwhile what is NATO up to? Are NATO personnel engaged in sabotage within Libya? Are there mercenaries also working against Gheddafi within the country to destabilize his regime? Do they have a hand in sabotage and murder in order to blame the Gheddafi administration and provide grist for the Western press mill? SENIOR EDITOR GAITHER STEWART is also a veteran journalist and novelist who serves as our European correspondent, based in Rome. His latest book is The Trojan Spy (Callio).PAYBACK: THE PRICE OF COLONIALISM
By 1934, Libya was pacified. As mentioned, official policy encouraged integration of Italian colonizers. Benito Mussolini, Italy’s Fascist dictator, declared himself Protector of Islam because the Arabic nationalist movement suited his policies in opposition to Great Britain and France. His policy was further colonization of Libya, giving Italians there land confiscated from indigenous inhabitants. By January 9, 1939, the colony of Libya was incorporated into metropolitan Italy and thereafter considered an integral part of the Italian state (Libya was to be part of the Greater Italia, dreamed by the Italian irredentists). Libyans, the officially called “Muslim Italians”, were admitted to the National Fascist Party and Libyan military units were born within the Italian army. Two divisions of Libyan Infantry participated in the desert war against Great Britain.
Silvio Berlusconi Underneath the Arches of Rubygate
Not too improbably, what may have kept Berlusconi afloat is that he’s “all too human” in the eyes of many Italians. His penchant for nubile girls is certainly proof of that.
By Gaither Stewart
[print_link]
February 19, 2011
“Bunga bunga” is a new word in the Italian vocabulary, familiar to probably 99 per cent of the nation’s sixty million inhabitants. Allegedly, Berlusconi borrowed the word from his friend, Muammar Gheddafi, the dictator of Libya known for his extravagant excesses, to describe his own private parties. Bunga bunga means sex games. Girls who have been there describe Berlusconi’s bunga bunga room, equipped for pole dancing and such. A room for explicit sex games. Group sex, in the popular belief. Like twenty half nude young women caressing each other for the amusement and stimulation of the Grand Old Sultan. Berlusconi claims that his hard, dedicated work for the people excuses his nocturnal passions: nights, he needs relaxation and entertainment. He needs bunga bunga.
Strangely, few Berlusconi supporters censor the Leader. They are titillated by the bunga bunga image and would do the same if they had the means. Their advice to Berlusco is: Resist! Resist! Resist! Resist the old-fashioned opposition that wants to carry modern Italy back to the dark ages. And resist he does. A new poster depicts a Berlusconi-Balboa wearing boxing gloves, his guard up, his face a mask of blood, while the fighter repeats out of the corner of his contorted mouth, “I’m not worried at all!”
Every Italian knows that Ruby gate refers to the minor, “Ruby”, that is, Karima El Mahrough, a Moroccan teenager, whom Sultan Silvio the First instructed to refer to herself around the Milan clubs and bars she frequents as an Egyptian and a niece of Mubarak. Then, she claims, he paid her a total of 187,000 euros, about $250,000, for her sexual services and his personal entertainment. That was before his perhaps fatal intercession with the Milan police to release her after she was arrested for theft.
Now four judicial processes against Berlusco are scheduled during the next forty days: a series of cases of false accounting, tax fraud, corruption, bribery of police officials and judges, charges known to most everyone in Italy. The man who claims to be “the most persecuted man in the world” is on the verge of transformation into “the most prosecuted man in the world”, as he should have been a decade and a half ago.
“Old man,” the girls say behind the back of the short, neckless old man with his ridiculous wig or whatever it is he wears on his round head and his built-up shoes. Old man pretending to be a young buck. So hyped up on Viagra that his own doctors worry about his heart. “Culo flaccido,” flaccid ass, the girls of the harem call him, the girls he put up in a luxurious apartment house in his very own Milano 2, the residential city of 10,500 apartments allegedly financed by mafia money. Maybe the harem-apartment building too was another Gheddafi idea.
Well, well! Rubygate. The Sultan’s undoing. Or is it? Things have a tendency to go haywire in this land of lemon tree gardens. Bet on a losing horse and win a million. Bet on a winner and lose a fortune. Mussolini, like many Roman emperors, learned too late about the fickleness of Italian electors. Now it’s showdown time for Berlusconi the First. His sundown. The decline has set in.
An interesting observation of recent days is that the end of Berlusconi means also the end of Italy’s pitiful political attempt at a two-party system in imitation of America: Berlusconi’s People of Liberty Party on one side and the moderate left, the Democratic Party, on the other. Now however center parties have revived, as has the far left. Italy is returning to its true, splintered political self which in reality has never disappeared.
Now, new revelations by Wikileaks show that Berlusconi made a secret deal with Washington: Obama’s support for his government at last year’s G8 in Italy in exchange for greater Italian participation in the spread of the US empire: more Italian soldiers in Afghanistan, elite soldiers freed of restraining caveats and rules of engagement, troops free to combat alongside Marines. And more US military bases in Italy itself. Bases with extra-territorial rights operating free of Italian interference.
Lechery. Moral corruption. The old, old idea of the self-made man. Such considerations inevitably invite the question: is this moral degeneration only an Italian phenomenon? Or is it universal in our times?
I have dedicated a British song of the 1930’s—in this case a dirge—to Sultan Silvio Berlusconi the First, who lived a life of dream, a dream as if it were life:
Underneath the arches
We dream our dreams away …
Every night you’ll find us
Tired out and worn
Underneath the arches
We dream our dreams away.
Lily Pad Roll.
THE FASCINATION OF THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD
A Personal Testimony
Bel Paese, as Italians like to call this truly beautiful peninsula jutting out southwards into the Mediterranean Sea and nearly reaching Tunisia. I also wanted the whole Mar Nostrum, the sea around which our Western civilization developed; I set for myself the secret goal of knowing all the lands surrounding the great sea. The attraction I felt was perhaps the same allure for the succession of peoples and civilizations, which have sought to both control and unite this beautiful and unique world. Though my original love for Italy has faded and waned in the vulgarity of contemporary Italy, not so the magical lure of the Mediterranean World as such.
Historically, the Mediterranean World tends to absorb and assimilate peoples more quickly than in north Europe. I was an adult when I moved here. Yet I have been assimilated here in a way that did not happen in my many years in Germany. However, as compared to my children not completely so, who though born as children of the north, grew up in the city of Rome. Today, even though they have now lived years in the USA, they still consider Rome their “home”. Like other Mediterranean cities, like also New York City, Rome opens its arms and invites racially similar newcomers to join. Racism and religious fundamentalism are new phenomena in the “ideal” Mediterranean World, where common cultural heritage weighs heavier than prejudice and exclusion.
A look at the atlas shows the big island of Sicily in the dead center of the Mediterranean Sea. The key to control of maritime routes linking East and West, North and South. Every power of the Old World wanted to possess that magical land. Sicily! Truly a land of magic and enchantment. Still today you find there remnants of those variegated old cultures: Greek amphitheaters and temples, Arab mosques, Norman cathedrals, Spanish urban architecture. During the sixty-four years of the golden age of that Norman kingdom in the sun, the land of Sicily, for the first time in history, hosted the three major racial and religious traditions of the Mediterranean littoral and became a kind of bank and clearing-house of the culture and knowledge of three continents: Europe, Africa and Asia.
Time passed. New empires formed. Romans defeated the Carthaginians and ultimately controlled the entire Mediterranean. After the Romans, arrived in the Mediterranean World a succession of foreign invaders—Arabs, Normans, German, Spaniards, French, the Papacy—who occupied parts of what we now call Italy, a geographical spear pointed south, which became a launch pad to the rest of the Mediterranean World.
As Albert Camus emphasized, the recognition of limits has marked the ideal Mediterranean mentality. Excess is negative. The advent on the age-old stage of an America singing “from the shores of Tripoli” has changed such attitudes. The America of excess is not a paradigm for the traditional ideal Mediterranean mentality and culture. In this world, satraps have of course always existed and thrived, though as a rule their fate has been that of today’s Ben Ali, erstwhile dictator of Tunisia, and likewise today, the fate facing Egyptian dictator, Hosni Mubarak, who long ago forgot the traditional Mediterranean quality of moderation and recognition of limits.
A brief look at an atlas confirms the specific geographical unity of that world, into which one enters from the West through the narrow Straits of Gibraltar. From one moment to the next, you seem to step back in time and find yourself in another world. The Mediterranean is lined by diverse peoples, nations and cultures, from Spain and Morocco to Tunisia and Italy, to Greece, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine, interlinked by a common heritage and histories.
The Great Sea, one of the most important maritime routes in the world, encompasses three continents and in the doing also the three monotheistic religions. Not only disputed by its own peoples, its mild climate, its magic, its sorcery have drawn for over two millennia countless non-Mediterranean peoples—conquerors, colonizers, migrants (and today international tourists), often in search of the sun, but as a rule in search of the freedom of a new way of life.
The history of the Mediterranean includes the separate though linked histories of the world’s major civilizations: ancient Greeks, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans and Arabs, as well as the three major monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Sometimes at war, sometimes in peace, their common history is both one of prosperity, such as that of the Arabs in Sicily, or one of destruction as during the Crusades and, today, Israeli occupation of Arab lands.
It is no accident that some of the greatest world cities mark the Mediterranean World, originating in times when the locations of cities were studied and planned. For many centuries, Athens, Rome, Alexandria and Marseille have been centers of world trade and culture. Doubtless the history of our entire world would have been vastly different if not for the shifting around of continents and bodies of water in pre-historic times which resulted in this incredible geographical unity.
So what else remains? That is the question one must pose. What alternatives remain? I did not intend this essay as a comment on the Egyptian enigma. Yet, today, one can hardly write about the Mediterranean World without turning to the ongoing revolt now reaching from Algeria to Tunisia to Egypt.
I view Egypt today from an Italian perspective. Italians know well that Egypt is a major repository of Mediterranean heritage. Rome with its big Egyptian population. Its pyramids from Egypt. Sharm el Sheik on the Red Sea is Italian territory. Nile cruises to Luxor. The pyramids. The great library in Alexandria. Places every Italian traveler knows.
But Mubarak? Egyptian politics?
Conspiracy remains alive at every latitude. One fundamental question echoes across the Mediterranean from Egypt to Rome: Why the sudden withdrawal of U.S. support for Mubarak after thirty years of support and the annual billions of American tax dollars? Why? A qui bono? Cui prodest? Is this another CIA mafia-like maneuver, to change things so that nothing changes? Has Washington suddenly awakened to the fact that its support of corrupt regimes is turning against its own interests?
Conspiracy? But against whom? Moslem Brotherhood a threat? Moslem Brothers, a CIA asset? A mystery. Does the answer lie in Israel? The echo of the conundrum of power in Egypt arrives also in Rome, but it goes largely unheard.
Just as Sicily in the Old World, Egypt is a regional kingpin today. Though the “bread revolt” in Tunisia made a model for the Egyptian rebels, Egypt with its eighty million people is another dimension. For decades Egypt has been considered the guarantor of regional stability. The first Arab State to sign a peace accord with Israel, in 1979, for which Israel has defended Hosni Mubarak’s iron-fisted reign. Israel and the USA have relied on the Islamic Sunni Bloc led by Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to thwart religious domination by Shia’a Iran. Is that pact at an end?
Many aspects of U.S. international relations pass through the Middle East. Therefore, through Egypt, and that because of the decades-long priority for Washington of the State of Israel and Middle Eastern oil. That is one explanation of why billions of U.S. tax payers dollars have gone to Mubarak’s Egypt. And that also explains Washington and Europe’s caution about the Egyptian uprising: first the West defended the right to protest, followed then by timid demands for “peaceful transition to democracy.”
For thirty years Mubarak has deceived and deluded everyone—Europe, USA, Israel and Egyptians themselves—with the dilemma: Either I, Mubarak, or the Moslem Brotherhood. The dictator has performed in true dictator style, offering rewards to Western friends who in turn have granted him the title of “moderate” and his regime as a moderate one. The millions of Egyptians on the streets today do not agree.
Camus is right about excess and limits. The time of contemporary Mediterranean dictatorships is over. Metaphorically, one might say, the Mediterranean Sea has risen against excess. And today the Old Sea demands recognition of limits. A lesson, perhaps, also for western lands far beyond the Old World of the Mediterranean Sea.
Lily Pad Roll.
The Unbearable Lightness of Vulgarity
(Rome) NEITHER ITALIANS nor foreign observers should err as to where real Mafia power resides. It resides and thrives in the vulgarity of contemporary Italy in the era of Silvio Berlusconi. It was born in Italy and flourishes in Italy. Now it has swept across the nation from south to north on the waves of what is here called Berlusconism. And it has established its headquarters in the city of Berlusconi, Milan, Italy.
The journalist-writer Roberto Saviano in his now world-famous book, Gomorrah, projected the image of the real, the original Mafia, onto the world scene. Mafia is a three-headed monster, Saviano explained on a new national TV show, Vieni Via Con Me. The Mafia world concern is composed of the Camorra in the Naples area, the N’drangheta in Calabria and the original Mafia in Sicily. However, the present headquarters of the monster, according to Saviano, and according to many non-Berlusconian experts, are now located in rich Milan in north Italy.
The mafia has become All Italian. It remains irresistibly and unbearably light to the touch of political Italy. With passing time, it has become the epigone, if not the model, of Italy’s contemporary vulgarity.
Berlusconi-Mafia? Silvio Berlusconi, Prime Minister of Italy—the primary protagonist of Italian socio-politics of the last Ventennio—the word means a period of 20 years, the term which is historically used in reference to the 20-year Fascist dictatorship of Benito Mussolini—is today depicted as the Mafia’s man at the helm of the nation. The Mafia, at the head of the Italian government. Saviano, on the socio-political TV spectacle, Vieni via con me, (Come Away With Me, perhaps into dreams, or perhaps in flight from the land where lemon trees grow)—a show of left-wing singers, dancers, comics and political commentators with their lists——lists of lists of the things wrong with Italy.
Saviano however is the star attraction. He scratches his shaved head, slightly embarrassed, runs a finger along his nose, clears his throat and says unequivocally that the Mafia now resides in Milan. Like the New Russians make their money in Russia and spend it in Europe, the New Mafia makes its enormous wealth at the expense of the Mezzogiorno, the south of Italy, but invests and recycles it in the north.
Saviano (Left), for many Italians a modern day hero of our time, under constant police escort since his book, Gomorrah, claims that Mafia money stands behind the emergence of the industrialist, Silvio Berlusconi back in the 1970s when he appeared from the jungle of the Milanese entrepreneurial world to build the huge, luxury residential area of Milano 2, establish a TV empire of three national networks and soon after buy one of Europe’s most successful soccer clubs, Milan. And now, as comic Roberto Benigni claims, he wants to own everything. “Mine, mine mine”, he cries, in his mad attempt to own everything and become God. All with mafia money, one adds cynically.
So what does this information translate into? It translates into Mafia control. Into a Mafia society.
THE STRUTTING AND THE STAGGERING OF A WOULD-BE-DICTATOR
Imagine a chief of government who urges world leaders, especially of more subservient nations, to refer to him as “President” Silvio Berlusconi. A chief of government who leads his followers in the singing of his hymn, Thanks That There Is Silvio. Yet his wide power in Italy, his imagined influence outside Italy, his influence on U.S.-Russian relations for example, is all part of his own mad, megalomaniacal dream. A chimera outside real reality. A mirage in the Desert of the Tartars of that wonderful film of the pre-Berlusconi era when Italy was truly a cultural leader.
For Berlusconi (Left) is not the President. Generously, he is at the most a shaky, criminal Prime Minister, on the verge of his own personal disaster. Imagine a would-be President, who on a visit to Bulgaria announces publicly that since his second wife is divorcing him there is a “long line of women who want to marry him.” Him, this short, squat old man trying to be young, false hair that doesn’t look like hair, suntan reaching his neck, jacked up shoes in an attempt to be at least as tall as France’s Sarkozy or his “friend” Putin in Russia, a man who unabashedly declares himself the “best in Europe.” A man who also happens to be the richest man in Italy and one of the richest men in the world who cannot legally explain the source of his wealth. A man who, in his own words, loves women, and must relax in the presence of “escorts”, that is, prostitutes, beautiful women better than him who must despise him.
If Italy is not precisely a Banana Republic, “bananas” is perhaps the closest definition of what is happening in the land where, paradoxically, the beautiful lemon trees grow. There are however—to back up the international role of the unruly “underbelly of Europe”—as Cold War anti-Communists once described Italy—the full U.S. power of gunboats stationed along the Mediterranean Sea and the powerful U.S. airforce at its many bases from north to south of the peninsula-aircraft carrier of the Bel Paese, from which it bombarded and destroyed Belgrade in 1999.
Above all however there is the nation’s richest man, Silvio Berlusconi, who has bought himself a parliament and a sheaf of ministers--accomplices who run things to the tune of iron-clad laws, and who will do anything to ingratiate himself to Washington. Prime Minister Berlusconi, who wants to be known as the Supreme Leader, will do anything to stand at the side of the USA’s worldwide military adventures. A man who heads a system which continues to pass laws to suppress an independent magistracy and a free press in the face of a divided opposition
Yet, despite all, Berlusco’s government is unraveling. At a rapid pace. Still, formally a parliamentary democracy, the Italian government exists on a parliamentary majority as elected by the “sovereign people.” As above, Mr. Berlusconi not only appointed his ministers—not however on merit but on blind loyalty to the would-be President—but also after designing himself an electoral law which gives him the right to literally name the parliamentary deputies then dutifully elected by the “sovereign” people.
Berlusconi’s party’s co-founder, Gianfranco Fini, ex-neo-Fascist, today’s President of the Chamber of Deputies, more powerful than the House Speaker in the U.S. system, has withdrawn his former party’s ministers from the government, abandoned Berlusconi, and formed a new party of the “democratic right.” One after another the rats are abandoning the sinking ship. A Senator or a Minister here, a parliamentary Deputy there. Strikes, popular unrest, a nationwide movement of persons leaving Italy have branded Italy, once called the “Beautiful Land”, the sewer of Europe. In the words of other Europeans, a wonderful place to visit—at least it once was—but hell to live in.
Recently, immigrants demanding residence permits mounted a high crane in the northern industrial city of Brescia for 19 days in protest. When they finally descended, cold, wet and hungry, some got their residence permits (proving again that resistance pays); others were meanly deported. Workers strikes against FIAT, Italy’s biggest industry, because it closes down plants and moves them and the jobs to other parts of Europe. Transportation strikes, teachers’ strikes, pay cuts in the country with Europe’s lowest salaries, the equivalent of food stamps flourishing, the widening division between the political caste and people, between rich and poor, between Italy of the north and Italy of the South, between ethnic Italians and immigrants. TV networks and press freedom muzzled. The piles of garbage now literally submerging the territory of once beautiful Naples, infecting citizens with God knows what diseases. The reconstruction of the once beautiful, earthquake demolished city of L’Aquila, one hour from Rome, abandoned after much fanfare, after constructing a handful of showcase apartments. An earthquake celebrated and actually toasted by gleeful government appointed re-constructors. Museums closed nationwide for lack of funding: Pompei’s prize archaeological site, the House of Gladiators, collapsed from lack of maintenance, pot-holed streets and West Europe’s worst public transportation, a nation-state with a Prime Minister the laughing stock of Europe.
Bel paese? Folklore for nostalgics. From day to day, Italy at the tail end of most statistical photographs of a nation. Lowest salaries, highest prices, violence growing at an unprecedented pace, and shame of shame no restaurants at the top of Michelin guides and its national sport, soccer, in 16th place in the world.
As Mafia-backed dictatorship draws near, more of Italy is rebelling. The Berlusconi system, up to the last minute as it begins to disintegrate and collapse like Pompei, continues to crush an independent magistracy and a free press.
I searched the NY Times today for news about the student protests spreading like wildfire. Perhaps its news bureau in Rome is busy with the Middle East, but I found no mentions. Nor did I see news about Italian opposition press led by Rome’s La Repubblica, in protest against the gag of the voice of a free press, against the rigid controls over the public TV networks of RAI, widely reported throughout Europe. Nothing about the Mafia. It’s Mafia business as usual. As if it were nothing unusual.
Yet: Italy is not the United States of America. Protest against Mafia Fascism is growing. Right-wing parts of Berlusconi’s own government party, The People of Freedom, have defected. Western Europe’s lowest paid workers are in turmoil. Tens of thousands of students yesterday, took to the streets and the rooftops of government buildings, rail stations and universities from Palermo to Milan in protest against the proposed useless, noxious educational reforms. Just as those immigrants who protested at the top of gigantic cranes against residential restrictions.
The “people” show signs of stirring. Not a precise political movement, however. Left, right and center together. Workers and immigrants, and now university and high school students have joined in the protest against rising study costs. Austerity is the government slogan when, as some economists believe, it should be spending. Especially budget cuts for culture, schools and universities. Private schools gain, public schools lose. Meritocracy is the slogan. Support for achievers and screw the rest.
The students have returned to the streets. But not only the streets this time. In these days they take to the rooftops where they are invulnerable. They learned the tactic from immigrant workers atop the cranes and plant rooftops.
HERE IS A RUNDOWN of student protest that exploded during America’s Thanksgiving week, protests which brought out tens or hundres of thousands of Italy’s university and high school students—no one knows the total number—in a show of strength against a parliamentary bill of wide cuts and reductions in the entire education sector.
Marching through garbage filled streets, students occupied the “Oriental” University in Naples. Several hundred students marched in Palermo and occupied the political science building, and in Bari the Engineering faculty. Thousands of egg-throwing students marched through Turin, occupied the main rail station of Porta Susa and the landmark rooftop, Mole Antonelliana, high over the city, and in Pisa the world-famous “leaning tower.”
As massive police units tried to protect the entire Historic Center of the capital, students staged a colourful, symbolic occupation of Rome’s Coliseum, protests at the Ministry of Education, occupation of various faculty buildings including the famous Faculty of Architecture where student protests began in the 1968 era, putting pressure on reinforced police forces defending the national Parliament and “President” Berlusconi’s private Rome residence. Researchers and students lined the rooftops of Milan and the terraces of the Politechnical Institute, while police attacked corteges on street level injuring various persons. In Ferrara, a funeral march for the “death of the university. Occupation of a faculty in Trieste, protests at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, protests in Ancona, Perugia, Bologna, Sienna, Florence, students joined by professors in Cagliari in Sardinia, in Aosta, in the port city of Genua, blocking traffic everywhere and testing police tactics. Some students ecstatic at the national successes, now threaten to “occupy” the Vatican.
While nationwide manifestations were underway, in Parliament the Berlusconi majority went under on amendments to the education bill and one heard the first rumblings of withdrawal of the entire education bill. The air smells of the end of an era. The end of an epoch.
What does all this mean to the future students are fighting for? It means that protest and resistance pay. They pay off in the end. Maybe such days will happen again and again, not only in Italy where, in the South, lemon trees still grow, but also in colder climates.
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Senior Editor GAITHER STEWART's latest novel is THE TROJAN SPY (Callio). Based in Rome and Paris, he serves as TGP's European correspondent.